Alchemy's Lane-Based Approach to Optical Sorting
- Jun 25
- 2 min read
SureSort takes a different approach to optical sorting: instead of one machine per commodity, each lane identifies and sorts every recyclable that passes through it. Here's a short video showing the system in action, with a walkthrough of what you're looking at below.
What's happening on screen
By the time material reaches SureSort, upstream processes in the MRF have already stripped out cardboard, fibre, and other incompatible material from the stream — what's left going into the system is the container stream: 3D containers ready for sorting. From there:
Auger delivery — material is fed into the system via an auger-based hopper, which delivers it up vertically onto the line at a controlled, consistent rate ahead of sorting.
Singulation — material is spread into narrow individual lanes, so each item passes through the system on its own rather than overlapping with the next.
Identification — as each item passes, Alchemy's AI vision system identifies what it is in real time: PET, HDPE, polypropylene, aluminium, fibre, and more, all in the same pass.
Sorting — once identified, each item is positively ejected into the correct stream using precision air jets, sorting multiple commodities simultaneously rather than dedicating a separate machine to each one.
Closed loop — any material not captured on the first pass recirculates back through the system rather than being lost to waste, giving it another chance to be identified and sorted on a subsequent pass, leading to higher recovery rates.
Why multi-lane matters
Traditional optical sorters are typically built around one machine per commodity — a sorter for PET, another for HDPE, another for aluminium, and so on. That works, but it's expensive and space-hungry, which is exactly why it's mostly been the preserve of large-scale MRFs.
SureSort's multi-lane design flips that: each lane sorts every commodity that passes through it, in the same pass. That means a facility can get genuine multi-commodity optical sorting in a fraction of the footprint and cost — and it's modular, so lanes can be added as volumes grow rather than needing to plan for maximum capacity from day one.
The result is consistently high purity and recovery, without the cost or footprint of running one machine per commodity — which is exactly the gap SureSort was built to close.
Want to see what a SureSort system could look like at your facility? Get in touch — we're happy to walk through the technology in more detail.